[ It's also possible you might have chosen a modern version of Windows and been successful as well.

Not I feel if security was a major issue.

I can't disagree that a well-designed UNIX-based solution might have an edge security-wise over its Windows-based counterpart. "Well-desinged" is very much part of the key here; inapproprite use of NFS/NIS, for example, does not constitute "well-designed".

So, are UNIX-based systems inherently more secure than Windows-based ones? That's a tough call. Windows' huge market share makes it a more attractive target for attacks. Serious Windows vulnerabilities often make front page news on CNN.com. UNIX-based systems have plenty of their own problems. However, vulnerabilities in Sendmail, Apache, BIND and related packages--all common software on UNIX-based servers--rarely get that kind of media coverage. These two factors combined give the illusion that Windows is radically less secure, and I'm not entirely convinced that's the case.

Steve M. Taylor said:

Sasha Jevtic said:

With the right planning, nowadays you can plug a new machine into the network and go home. By the time you return in the morning, it will have booted over the network to a Windows installer, installed Windows with the appropriate drivers, installed all software appropriate for the machine (based on departmental association, etc), fully patched itself, and will have received all the appropriate customizations (restrictions, etc.).

And you can readily change the word "Windows" to "Linux", and be more secure.

Steve

Sure, you could do all this on Linux too, but my point here is that Windows has made some real progress in manageability since Windows 9x.